I'm a privacy pragmatist, writing about the intersection of law, technology, social media and our personal information. If you have story ideas or tips, e-mail me at khill@forbes.com. PGP key here.
These days, I'm a senior online editor at Forbes. I was previously an editor at Above the Law, a legal blog, relying on the legal knowledge gained from two years working for corporate law firm Covington & Burling -- a Cliff's Notes version of law school.
In the past, I've been found slaving away as an intern in midtown Manhattan at The Week Magazine, in Hong Kong at the International Herald Tribune, and in D.C. at the Washington Examiner. I also spent a few years traveling the world managing educational programs for international journalists for the National Press Foundation.
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Beware, Tech Abandoners. People Without Facebook Accounts Are 'Suspicious.'

The term “Crackberry” seems silly today — and not just because consumers OD’ed on Blackberry and moved on to iDealers. The term arose in an earlier “aughts” time when Blackberry dominated the smartphone market and lawyers and execs were nearly the only ones who had them, due to their need to be able to respond to email immediately. Things have changed. Now we all need to be able to respond to email immediately. And to tweet. And to instantly share our photos on Facebook. We’re all addicted to technology now, and not just to the Blackberry. We’re “addicted” to our iPhones, and Facebook, and Twitter, and Android, and Pinterest, and iPads, and Word with Friends, and fill-in-the-blank-with-your-digital-dope-of-choice.

The sudden and dramatic advent of social-media-enabling technologies into our lives seems to be causing some mid-digital-life crises. Not only has Silicon Valley developed a guilty conscience about addicting us to screens, we the users are starting to question how technology is changing us: making us fat, making us unhealthy, making us depressed, making us lonely, making us narcissistic, and making us waste time worrying about whether it’s making us fat, unhealthy, depressed, narcissistic and/or lonely. That’s leading some users to consider abandoning the whole enterprise. My colleague Haydn Shaughnessy gave up his smartphone last year. Now, inspired by the example of former Facebooker Katherine Losse, he’s considering giving up Facebook.

Slashdot flagged a German news story in which an expert noted that mass murderers Anders Breivik and James Holmes both lacked much of a social media presence, leading to the conclusion, in Slashdot’s phrasing, that “not having a Facebook account could be the first sign that you are a mass murderer.”

That’s a tad extreme, but I’m seeing the suggestion more and more often that a missing Facebook account raises red flags. After a woman found out via Facebook that a man who’d ‘poked’ her in real life had a long term girlfriend, she turned to digital manners advice givers Farhad Manjoo and Emily Yoffe of Slate to ask whether she should tell the girlfriend. They said she should and then went on a digression about transparent romances in the age of Facebook:

Farhad: I think we’ve mentioned it before that if you are going out with someone and they don’t have a Facebook profile, you should be suspicious.

Emily: Wait a minute. You may have mentioned that.

Farhad: I think I’ve recommended that. You know why, though? Imagine if this guy didn’t have a Facebook profile. That’s why. You should be suspicious of someone who is not making your relationship known publicly on a site like Facebook. I’m going to go on record with that.

Emily: I’m fine with people not having a Facebook page if they don’t want one. However, I think you’re right. If you’re of a certain age and you meet someone who you are about to go to bed with, and that person doesn’t have a Facebook page, you may be getting a false name. It could be some kind of red flag.

It’s not just love seekers who worry about what the lack of a Facebook account means. Anecdotally, I’ve heard both job seekers and employers wonder aloud about what it means if a job candidate doesn’t have a Facebook account. Does it mean they deactivated it because it was full of red flags? Are they hiding something?

The idea that a Facebook resister is a potential mass murderer, flaky employee, and/or person who struggles with fidelity is obviously flawed. There are people who choose not to be Facebookers for myriad non-psychopathic reasons: because they find it too addictive, or because they hold their privacy dear, or because they don’t actually want to know what their old high school buddies are up to. My own boyfriend isn’t on Facebook and I don’t hold it against him (too much).

But it does seem that increasingly, it’s expected that everyone is on Facebook in some capacity, and that a negative assumption is starting to arise about those who reject the Big Blue Giant’s siren call. Continuing to navigate life without having this digital form of identification may be like trying to get into a bar without a driver’s license.

Case in point: Katherine Losse, the ex-Facebook employee that quit the company and the social network after cashing in her stock options, and who inspired my colleague to consider UnFacebooking, couldn’t stay off Facebookfor long. She wound up opening a new account.

“You can’t get away from it. It’s everything. It’s everywhere,” she told the Washington Post. “The moment we’re in now is about trying to deal with all this technology rather than rejecting it, because obviously we can’t reject it entirely.”

Well, you can, but it might lead to your being rejected down the line too.

* Updated August 7 to include some reasons why a person might choose not to be on Facebook, beyond being too busy planning commando attacks.

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It’s funny you say that because I happen to think that any grown adult who thinks that highly of Facebook is a sociopath and should be avoided. Your friend likes to bash Facebook one minute, bu can’t compel herself to quit the site? I wonder why that is. Could it be that your friend needs (not wants) to be inundated with a sense of approval that she can only get in the virtual world? If so, her problems are bigger than anything that can be solved through the internet.

Anybody who relies on social media to facilitate a social life is, to be blunt, pathetic. In the real world, nobody cares about the number of likes you’ve been getting for your pointless status updates or uploaded pictures of your pets. If you want to be liked, go out in the real world and actually show folks you’re an interesting human being with captivating thoughts, skills, and/or abilities. It’s almost shameful that modern adulthood has regressed back into this I-Wonder-What-Facebook-Thinks mentality thats permeated through most of our lives.

As far as your friend using Facebook as a dealbreaker, does she really think that Facebook is a good source of truthful information so much that she’s willing to dismiss somebody for simply abstaining from it? You’ve got to be kidding. Some of you folks need to really get over yourselves.

There’s almost 7 billion people in the world and there’s under 1 billion “users” on facebook (counting all the fake ones). By this logic 6 billion people are suspects? When you’re world revolves around fb / twit / social “dope”, you’re suspect. There’s a real world out there waiting for your to post more crap on your fb page about it.

Then there are people that need to make an announcement that, “they are giving up facebook”. As the old Nike saying goes, “Just Do It”. Not getting enough attention on fb, is that why people are announcing to the world that they are now “leaving” this mystical place called fb?

Since we’re doing some overly critical diagnosis of people NOT having fb pages, is having an fb page and then “leaving fb” the new cry for suicide help? According to “experts”, it is!

“You can’t get away from it. It’s everything. It’s everywhere,” – please, enough with the drama. People tend to forget how useless 90% of fb post are. I have a fb profile and the best part about it? It reminds me of my friend’s birthdays, that’s about all I use it for. Those birthdays make up for the other 10%.

It’s worth noting that most of those 6 billion people are probably poor and don’t have internet access. This article seems to be more centered around the U.S. population, so your argument really falls flat.

No, it doesn’t. You’re just providing a point of clarification on one thing Nikho said. Many of the 6 Billion who aren’t on Facebook couldn’t be even if they wanted to. But there are A LOT of people of people who CHOOSE not to be on Facebook (Twitter,etc) in the US and internationally.

Your point doesn’t at all invalidate Nikho’s “argument”…if you can call it that. Everything else he said seems spot on to me.

Huh? If anything it strengthens my argument. The fact that most of those “poor” 6 billion people are living their lives, just fine without facebook or other social drug is a testament that not everyone needs it, including those that are “rich” with internet access.

It’s very “popular” nowadays to hate Facebook among the counterculture, but just because your friends are useless on Facebook doesn’t mean that Facebook is not a big part of peoples’ lives in this day and age, especially among the younger crowd that uses this networking.

-If you want to ask someone out, you can know immediately if they’re already with someone or available using Facebook. -Many people don’t have time to keep up with many people at once, or have multiple social circles that are all completely disconnected. For example, I’ve moved 20+ times in my life, so I have social circles from each of these places I lived and I don’t have time to call each and every one of these people individually to make sure we still have a relationship. However, a relationship is maintained by comments on statuses and by being aware of what’s going on in the others’ life. -Facebook has become an incredibly easy way to plan events. Free to invite, can easily get the information out about an event you would like people to go to, and instant so you can know who’s coming to your party or other event immediately. -It can be used to contact hundreds of people at once. One of my friends just made a status a few days ago about having an extra ticket to a concert, and wanting to go with someone. Without Facebook, she would have had to contact each person she was willing to go with, see if they enjoyed the band, was free, and wanted to hang out. Instead she opened the opportunity to reconnect with old friends that she hadn’t talked to in a while and ended up going with someone that she considered a friend but hadn’t spoken to in a while, something that would not have happened otherwise.

Maybe you’re just too…old for Facebook, honestly. This is coming from the point of view of a 19 year old college student at a top 20 university, not some Facebook zombie, but even I recognize that within my age group Facebook is nearly essential to socializing. I do know a few people that don’t use Facebook. I also know that I would like to contact them, but considering I didn’t assume they don’t use Facebook when I met them I don’t have their phone numbers and because they reject Facebook I have no way to contact them. People I would like to see I end up never seeing because they don’t use Facebook. I also end up having to recount my entire life every time I see someone who doesn’t use it, because they don’t see status updates or changes.

Keep in mind that Facebook is only as good as your friends. If you have crappy friends that only post useless things, then you would have a bad Facebook experience. If you have higher quality friends who use Facebook as a social networking tool, then your experience is far improved and it becomes more essential to your life.

Milx you are the not so unique example of the socially damaging combination of the arrogance of youth swirled with the false sense of intellectual privilege. Many have dropped FB because of the dishonest IPO, Using their size to force small business to sell to FB or die, and now the news that FB is committing fraud with it’s advertisers by ratcheting up their bills by FB using bots to click adds. You do realize this article was PAID for right oh youthful ignorant one. FB is taking a hammering in the press over their alleged illegal fraudulent activities and look suddenly there is an article about how you have show people you are “normal” by having an FB page. If this wasn’t paid for then Google plus and other social media business would be mentioned in it. Instead it’s all “everyone must have a FB to prove they are normal”. I know this just like I know you are NOT presently working towards a degree in the sciences or math.

Please don’t make an assumption about my college major. I’m in Engineering. And whether or not the article was paid for, my comment was not paid for. My opinions weren’t paid for, and my friends and their updates aren’t paid for.

I understand that people drop Facebook for various reasons. What you don’t understand is that that makes no difference to my point whatsoever. It doesn’t make a difference to the point that in my age bracket, using Facebook makes everything a million times easier and more convenient. When people around my age don’t have a Facebook it usually ends up with them becoming more socially isolated, due to all the easy ways to keep in contact through Facebook. Either that, or they’re already socially isolated so see no need for it. I know why the few friends I have that don’t have Facebooks don’t have them, and none of them were citing business practices as their reason. And no, I don’t think of any of them as “suspects”. I do hang out with them less because it’s harder to make contact with them though. That was the point I was making, that for people around my age, not having Facebook is a serious decision that actually has a lasting effect on your social life.

I’m not speaking for your age bracket, or your social group. I’m speaking for mine, and expressing the flip side of “FACEBOOK IS DUMB EVERYONE ON IT IS STUPID HURR” that the original commenter was claiming. You’re pretty hostile for really no good reason. Is someone having legitimate reasons to use Facebook threatening to you somehow? I can understand why you would have a problem with the article, but I didn’t even mention the article in my comment. I was replying directly to Nikho, not to the article.

For the record, I have a Google+. I don’t use it because only maybe 10% of my friends have one. A social networking site is only as good as the people on it; if Myspace still had all my friends on it and Facebook had none that’s where I’d be. That’s why Facebook is “the thing” that people talk about. If Google+ ever really takes off I’m sure there will be similar articles about it.

Farhad is a faggot mangina. What’s he going to say next: “only those who wear nike shoes can play basketball”…”only those who pluck their eyebrows and get jersey shore tans can be considered normal?” Fuuuck that faggot: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y5OdQGbVNa4